Shields

Chapter 29: The Powered

You know how people say that when you're about to die, you're entire life flashes in front of you? Well they're wrong. The only thing that flashed before my eyes before I was flattened was a shimmery rainbow surface and the regret that I'd spent the last week of my life confined in a tiny room doing pointless exercises and eating rice, chicken and a roll three meals a day.

Or, maybe not so pointless. The glass rebounded off of my wall and slammed into the wall on my left, shattering into pieces with an ear shattering boom. Someone had to have heard that. If this is Achmetha's idea of a rescue, he's failing miserably. I thought, slowly letting my shield down.

It wasn't the best timing to do that though, because the men (or woman) who landed around me were definitely not friends. They all pointed their expensive machine guns at me except for one, who stepped forward.

"We can do this the easy way, or the hard way, decide quickly," he said, pointing his own gun at me.

I let my shield materialize in from of me and watched them all. "This is probably just a misunderstanding..." I started.

The guy pulled the trigger on his gun and with a bang, it shot off. Everything seemed to slow down for a second as the bullet headed towards my eye. It smacked into my barrier and everything speed up again.

The bullet didn't ricochet; it just flattened against the barrier and felt to the floor, a useless splat of metal. "That was a warning. Things won't be as easy for you next time. Are you going to come peacefully or not?"

"Now that you've taken the first shot, Julius will be headed here, if the glass crashing around the room didn't already alert him," I said, trying to stall.

"Take him down boys," the man said, moving out of the way.

That's when I noticed that the rifles the guys were holding weren't normal. They had some sort of tank attached to them. And there was the whole gas mask thing... Why did they need gas masks?

The guys shot off their rifles and green gas sprayed around me. It stopped short at my shield for a few seconds before moving on. It made sense that my shield would let in gases, otherwise I'd use up all of the air in it and suffocate, but right at that moment, I really wished it wouldn't. Of course, I blacked out before I could put much thought into that.

***

I woke up in a white room, strapped to a table, my mind foggy. I couldn't think straight or concentrate on anything. The room swam before my eyes, making it difficult to see anything either. My head hurt, but the pain was dulled by something, probably whatever drug they had given me to keep me in lockdown.

I pulled weakly at the straps, trying to get off of the table. I didn't have any strength left in me to fight, though. I wasn't getting out of this one alone. I needed help this time.

I realized, barely, that they had changed my clothes, which meant that they had the pill my mother had given me, even if they didn't know it. My clothes had been pretty nasty, though, so they probably hadn't bothered to keep them.

My head was clearing slowly as my enhanced immune system fought off the drug they'd given me. The pain in my head gradually sharpened, becoming a fiery inferno inside of me. I groaned, trying to get up again.

What's wrong with me? Why does this hurt so much? Then I remembered that I'd still had a shield up when I'd been knocked out. Maybe when I went, the shield stayed. It had when I'd fallen asleep. But if it was still there, how had they moved me.

I closed my eyes as the last effects of the drugs wore off and saw the shield in my mind. It had somehow been moved off of me and into a room where it was being experimented on. Somehow, I could see the scientist in my head, about to strike it again. The pain in my head escalated and I called back the shield just before the man swung the sledgehammer. I couldn't see him anymore, but I had no doubt that he'd hit thin air and fallen over.